2017 Reliability Rankings: QB

We’re just a month away now from the 2018 NFL Draft and a QB class packed with talent and intrigue.

We’ll see how many of those new guys can step into starting gigs right away. But before they actually arrive, let’s take a look back at what the 2017 passers did for our fantasy teams.

First off, the new guys will enter a league that saw QB scoring dip in 2017. The past season gave fantasy football owners:

-- our lowest QB1 point total since 2010-- our lowest QB6 total since 2008-- our lowest QB12 total since 2011-- our lowest QB18 total since 2011

We’re not talking about huge drop-offs. The QB18 spot was the only place 2017’s finisher fell 2+ points per game behind his 2016 counterpart. And the dip becomes less surprising when you count that the league attempted 807 fewer passes in 2017. That came out to about 1.6 per team game vs. 2016.

We could dig further into league-wide passing trends, but that’s not really the point of this article.

The Method

DraftSharks.com has been posting Reliability Rankings at the end of each season for a while. (Check out the 2016, 2015 and 2014 editions.) Below you’ll find the start of the 2017 version, but I’m changing the method a bit.

We still tracked how each QB fared week to week, but it’s a lot easier to finish 10th at the position in a given week when 6 teams are on bye vs. when everyone’s playing. And there will also be plenty of non-bye variation. Should a QB get more recognition for his 24-point outing just because it happened to place him 4th in Week 4 when the same score would have ranked 13th the next week?

For predictive purposes, it matters more that he scored 24 points -- unless there’s something about Week 4 that makes it a more difficult time to rack up fantasy stats.

So I compiled all the QB scores from every regular-season week of 2017 and found the median to determine what qualified as a top-12 (or “starter,” in a 12-team league) week. But I also took a look at where the biggest scoring gaps arose.

QB12 also sat 0.8 points per week ahead of the next level, which marked a bigger gap than other pairs down the list but obviously didn’t match the differences among the top 12.

Over the past 5 years -- using overall points per game rather than the weekly median -- QB1 beat QB2 by 2.4 points per game. That marked the largest split by far. Next largest: 0.8 between QB4 and QB5, as well as QB6 and QB7.

So, as you climb the weekly QB rankings, each step up near the top of the board has generally proved to be worth more than similar steps outside the top 8. Especially when you factor in the growth of DFS participation and best-ball formats in recent years, I thought it worth checking which QBs delivered the most high-end performances in 2017.

How They Fared

Using the 2017 median scores for each spot, here’s how often each QB posted scores at the following levels:

Notes:

-- Matt Ryan and Dak Prescott fell hard from their 2016 levels. Ryan finished 11 of 16 weeks among the top 12 QBs in 2016 before delivering just 3 top-12 level outings last year. Prescott didn’t drop quite so far but went from the same 11/16 to just 6/16 in 2017.

-- Prescott surfaced for a top-4 week at the Giants in December on the strength of a few long catch-and-run TDs. That came amid an 8-game stretch that saw him average 13.3 points across the other 7 outings and fall short of 18 points in each.

-- Marcus Mariota was the only other QB above 50% in 2016 (53.3%, 8 of 15) who fell below 50% last year.

-- Drew Brees posted top-12 level scoring in half of his games despite the drastic switch in New Orleans’ play breakdown that sliced 137 pass attempts off his season total vs. 2016. But he gave us none of the top-shelf Brees weeks we’ve come to expect. The veteran didn’t hit 27 fantasy points at all last season in this scoring system. The near-comeback in the Divisional playoffs marked just the 2nd time Brees eclipsed 2 TD passes all year.

-- After a quiet start to the season, Ben Roethlisberger went back to his familiar home-road splits over the 2nd half. Of his 5 top-12 level weeks, 3 reached top-2 level. All 3 of those -- plus another top-12 -- came at home. All 5 of those weeks came consecutively, from Week 11 through Week 15.

Seven other QBs joined Roethlisberger in spending most of their top-12 level weeks amid the position’s top-4 range:

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